SIX SECONDS IN DALLAS – I

By Jayantha Somasundaram

It was 12:30pm 22nd November 1963 at Dealey Plaza in Dallas Texas. President Kennedy’s Motorcade was on Elm Street, moving at 18 kmph. The Presidential Limousine was number two in the Motorcade, following the lead police car. In the limousine next to the driver sat Roy Kellerman, ranking Secret Service Agent (the presidential protective detail) behind them in the jump seats were Texas Governor John and Nellie Connally, and behind them were President John and Jackie Kennedy. Then came six seconds of gunfire; Kennedy and Connally were hit, the President fatally. Forty five minutes later at Parkland Memorial Hospital President Kennedy was pronounced dead.

A week later Kenndy’s successor President Lyndon Johnson appointed a six-member commission chaired by Chief Justice Earle Warren, and including future President Gerald Ford and former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director Allen Dulles, to investigate the assassination. In September 1964 they presented their findings in what has come to be called the Warren Commission Report.

The Warren Commission concluded that 24-year old Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated Kennedy without the aid or instigation of a third party. That using a Mannlicher-Carcano Carbine he fired from the sixth floor window of the Texas School Book Depository building in Dealey Plaza where he worked. He then took a bus and a taxi, arriving at his home at 1:00pm, leaving shortly thereafter armed with a pistol. When confronted by police officer Tippit at 1:15 Oswald shot and killed him. After he was arrested that afternoon in a cinema he was held in a Dallas jail until the 24th when nightclub owner Jack L. Ruby, also acting alone, shot and killed him.

All the doctors who treated Kennedy at Parkland Memorial were explicit: The cause of death was a massive head injury from a gunshot wound at the left temple. Besides the head injuries there were other wounds, a back wound nearly six inches below the collar alongside Kennedy’s spine and a throat wound in front.

If the wound at his left temple and throat were entry wounds, they could not have originated from the Book Depository because at the time of the shooting that building was positioned almost directly behind the Motorcade. Moreover nearly two-thirds of the witnesses questioned as to the origin of the gun shots, identified a grassy knoll located in front of the Motorcade as their source.

Magic Bullet

The Commission claimed that Oswald’s rifle could fire a bullet every 2.3 seconds. On the basis of cine films taken by spectators in Dealey Plaza it was established that the firing had lasted six seconds. Hence a maximum of three bullets could have been fired by Oswald’s weapon in the given time. One bullet missed the Motorcade and embedded itself in the pavement. If another was responsible for the head wounds then the third bullet had to have inflicted all the other wounds. So it would have had to enter Kennedy’s back torso and in the words of the Warren Report: ‘pierced the President’s throat and also caused Governor Connally’s wounds.’

The Warren Commission therefore created the ‘magic bullet’ which was fired from the Book Depository into Kennedy’s back, then turned through 120º and travelled up the body, turned through another 120º at his neck where it exited and then went on to inflict the wounds in Connally’s back, wrist and leg.

Oswald

At 12:44 by which time all other police patrol cars were ordered to converge on Dealey Plaza, Police Officer J.D.Tippit was detailed to Central Oak Cliff – the location of his death – ‘so that you will be at large for any emergency that comes in.’ Witnesses said that Tippit’s killer placed his elbows on the car window and appeared to be chatting with the officer. Had Tippit accosted his killer suspicious that he was the President’s assassin, the least he would have done was draw his gun and step out of the Police Car.

The only witness who claims that he saw Oswald fire at the President was Howard Brennan. He provided a description of Oswald to Secret Service Agent Sorrel after one pm. Tippit was shot at 1:15. At 12:45 however the Dallas Police had broadcast a description of Oswald. Moreover when Oswald was arrested that afternoon he was charged with Tippit’s killing; only twenty four hours later would Oswald be told that he would be charged with the assassination of the President. So why was Tippit’s killer wanted by the Dallas Police half an hour before Tippit was shot?

How reliable in any case was Brennan as a witness. Though he provided an accurate description of Oswald minutes after the assassination, just hours later that day he failed to pick Oswald out of a police line up! Brennan also told police that through the sixth floor window of the Book Depository he could see Oswald walking about. But the upper portion of that window was shut. So the Oswald that Brennan saw must have been walking about on his knees!

Jack Ruby

Once Oswald was identified as the President’s assassin it would be assumed that he was securely guarded and protected. Then how did Ruby get close enough to him in the Dallas Police garage to be able to kill him? Ruby who ran a couple of nightclubs in Dallas was said to be on speaking terms with about “700 of the 1,200 men on the police force.” There were standing orders that policemen and their guests be served anything on the house. In addition he also “made women available to officers.”

When Ruby appeared before the Warren Commission he was warned by both the Police and the Secret Service not to disclose certain matters. So he requested a transfer to Washington so that they “might get a fair shake out of him… Gentlemen,” he said “my life is in danger here.” He also said “someone in the Police Department is guilty of giving the information as to when Oswald was coming down (to the garage where he was killed).”

On November 14th a meeting took place in Ruby’s night club. The participants were Ruby, Tippit and Bernard Weisman, one of the leaders of the political right in Dallas. A crude but signed defamatory advertisement attacking the President was taken out by Weisman in the 22nd Dallas Morning News.

Ruby was identified hours before the assassination on the grassy knoll sporting a gun case and he was at Parkland Memorial after the assassination. Ruby was associated with elements of the US Armed Forces who were running guns to anti-Castro forces in Cuba. In a letter to the then Director of the CIA Richard Helms, Warren Commission Lawyers remarked that Ruby “was involved with members of the underworld…A Government informant in Chicago has reported that such Cubans (involved in gun-running to Cuba) were behind the Kennedy assassin.”

Fate of Witnesses

Interestingly witnesses like Mrs Tice who had identified Ruby at Parkland were harassed and threatened. Other witnesses suffered worse. One witness was shot through the head. Another hanged herself to death in the Dallas jail. After another witness was interviewed by independent investigators her son was arrested and injured when he fell out of a window in an alleged attempt to escape from the Dallas Police.

Two reporters visited Ruby’s apartment just after he had killed Oswald. One, a writer for the Dallas Times Herald was found dead in his Dallas apartment, the victim of a karate attack; the Dallas Police were unable to find his killer. The other a former Dallas resident and a prize-winning reporter for a California newspaper was shot to death in a California police station; the police were able to locate his killer – he was a local police officer. An eyewitness to the Tippit murder Mrs Acquilla Clemons stated that she was implicitly threatened with harm by a Dallas police officer if she disclosed what she had seen.

Abraham Bolden the first Black to serve on the White House Secret Service detail announced that he wanted to testify before the Warren Commission, because he was aware of the failure of the Service to take adequate precautions. Bolden was indicted by the Federal Government and charged with trying to sell government files.

Marina Oswald, Lee’s Russian widow had from the outset insisted on her husband’s innocence. But after she was threatened with deportation by Agents of the FBI her testimony changed. Jean Hill who had seen Ruby in Dealey Plaza soon after the assassination said that “the FBI was here for days. They practically lived here. They just didn’t like what I told them I had seen and heard when the President was assassinated. For years I have told the truth, but I have two children to support. I am a public school teacher. My Principal said that it would be best not to talk about the assassination, and I just can’t go through it all again. I can’t believe the Warren Report. I know it’s all a lie, because I was there when it happened!”

“To believe the Warren Commission” writes Robert Anson in They’ve Killed the President, “you have to believe that bullets pause in midair and make ninety degree right hand turns; that a poor marksman can do what experts cannot; that Newtonian laws of motion were not operating on November 22, that a man can be in two places at once; that atoms are able to change their structure; that everything in life is mere chance.”

The Hell Hole

What was the political climate in Dallas that November day in 1963? “God made big people like Kennedy. And God made little people like me, “drawled one Dallas resident. “But Colt made the .45 to even things out. “

Dallas residents sported ‘KO the Kennedys’ car stickers. There were lewd jokes about the hotline to the Vatican that ended in a Rome Sewer. On the eve of the assassination Protestant intolerance reached its zenith. A Baptist Convention was told “one of the greatest blunders in history was the election of a Roman Catholic President.” And that in future one should not vote Democrat or Republican but Protestant.

A Dallas newspaper accused Kennedy of being a follower of ‘the communist line, which is atheistic and godless.’ That Kennedy would ‘take a man’s income tax and without his permission spend it abroad as foreign aid in countries that deny a supreme creator!’

When the President landed in Dallas he faced placards which read ‘Kennedy Khrushchev and (Martin Luther) King’ and ‘Kennedy the Communist Party wants you re-elected.’

As the Presidential party embarked at Forth Worth Airport one of the local drivers asked Kennedy’s Special Assistant Larry O’Brian: Flying to Dallas? And when the latter nodded the man said “That’s the hell hole of the world!”

(To be continued)